Dear lord it's ugly. The sponsored box, people I know box, not to mention like a dozen other things that I don't use. Has someone "skinned" it with GreaseMonkey? Or actually built an app that just pulls their API and makes it prettier?

There are a number of Facebook skins you can use with Greasemonkey. Try out one or two of those, or, if you're Javascript-savvy, look at the source of the script yourself to see if it seems like something you could tweak yourself to your own liking.

Facebook Purity is a cool browser app that strips out all the irrelevant junk from your facebook homepage such as the boxes you mentioned that you never use, along with a whole load of other stuff. definitely worth checking out.